Canadian Ernie J. Zelinski provides an excellent book on planning for primarily the non-financial aspects of retirement. I'd recommend it to anyone getting their first AARP card at age 50. The advice is relevant for anyone out of college but the target audience is a bit older.
He focuses on several aspects that affect the quality of retirement - Health, Creativity, Social Connections, Age of retirement, Mental Fitness, Travel and relocation.
Of interest to me was the graphic on health. After the age of 50 the probability that someone will have very good to excellent health declines proportionally with age. At 50 the chance is 50% with the formula (100 - age). At age 70 you have a 30% chance of optimal health. Health is a primary determinant of how well a person enjoys retirement.
Having a passion or strong interest in continually improving yourself strongly determines success in retirement. Continually working on improving a skill or working on learning new things at the edge of our comfort zone allows us to be fully alive.
Ernie J. Zelinski - transition from work to retirement - 3 minutes
Julie Burstein has interviewed many creative people over the years at Public Radio's Studio 360. This book explores the creative process of each individual in sections up to 10 pages in length.
Some artists like Yo Yo Ma start each day with a ritual. He plays the same Bach piece as a warm up on his cello named Petunia. Each day it will sound different based on the temperature and the humidity.
Other artists such as Kevin Bacon, Alexander Payne describe how their family or their background shaped their creative process. Many artists describe methods for generating creative ideas and the long process of refining it until it is finished and celebrating the moment.
The book provides an eclectic look at creative people in the arts. The artists describe the often nonlinear path to creative insight or the journey to find the appropriate medium for self expression. I appreciated the variety from musicians, photographers, poets, film makers, actors and sculptures of art weighing several tons.
Glen Beck describes ten lesser known events from American History in gritty detail. The events start with the Revolutionary War and end with 911. Heroes and antiheroes share the pages. Shay's rebellion and the attempted kidnapping of Thomas Jefferson provide information on lesser known events.
Each story is told as a narrative and the author clearly lays out parts of the story including dialogue that fit the facts but we have no way of knowing if these were the exact words spoken. This allows history to come alive without being dishonest in its presentation.
The stories illuminate the history of an imperfect often unjust country that often makes snap judgments based on limited information. Glen relays the story of a woman wrongly accused of being Tokyo Rose. She was a US citizen trapped in Japan as the war started. She was convicted by the press based on inaccurate information.
The battle of Athens describes how GI's coming back from the war took back a town from a corrupt police department. Unchecked power leads to corruption.
The 911 story describes the domino effect that resulted because 20th hijacker was not allowed to enter the US. This hijacker did not make it on flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. In this case, the actions of ordinary citizens doing there job and trusting their instincts prevented additional tragedy and brought others to justice.
Sidney Poitier's autobiography covers his life from Cat Island in the Bahamas through his journey through Florida to New York and eventually California. This is a journey of a principled man who for significant part of his early life lived on the edge of failure and close to death. The culture in Florida attempted to put him in his place and define his options by the color of his skin. Because he grew up away from that culture he did not allow others to define who he was. As a teenager, he traveled from Florida to New York because he has about thirty dollars in his pocket, the train fair is less than $13 and it is far away from Florida.
He fell into acting because of an ad for actors on the page opposite the
job listing for dishwashers in New York. He was thrown out of his
first audition and told he should get a job as a dishwasher. He learns
English and proper diction on work breaks with the help of an older
Jewish worker at the restaurant. He spends years learning his craft. Running an unsuccessful restaurant trying to scrape together money in between acting jobs while supporting a growing family.
Sidney talks about the mysterious process that turns the negative energy of anger into forgiveness and reconciliation. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela all went through the long process to make that transition. Sidney uses that sense to survive life on his own terms. He turns down movie parts that do not reflect on who he is or what he wants to represent.
Sidney honors the efforts of his parents. They worked extremely hard for their family. His mother would collect large boulders and break the rocks apart by hand into gravel sized pieces. This would take one to two weeks. She would then sell the gravel to a local company who would drive by and pick it up. She would rest a week and start the process again.
Sidney provides candid information about the effects of divorce on his children and the advice he received from Harry Belafonte about being there for them. He found the relationship worked best was when he listened to them and didn't offer advice. The effort paid off and he now has an excellent relationship with his daughters after several stormy years.
Sidney Poitier - daughters and book discussion - Oprah - 11 minutes
Jennet Conant follows up her very informative and entertaining book The Irregulars with A Covert Affair, focused on Julia and Paul Child and their wartime friends at the OSS. It starts at the beginning of World War II with Julie Child and her friends recruitment into the OSS and continues through Red Scare of the 1950's.
The colonial powers in particular the Dutch and French were singled out for suppressing local independence movements in Indonesia and Vietnam. Jane Foster a mutual friend of Paul and Julia Child was stationed in Indonesia and reported on the Dutch abuses.
The messy situation in China towards the end of WWII also was a source of OSS frustration. The Nationalist Chinese were fighting a war on two fronts with both the Japanese and the Maoists. US pilots risked there lives to make supply drops to China only to have them sold back to the Japanese or diverted to the campaign against the Maoists.
Paul and Julia Child's slow friendship evolving into romance is a study in persistence. Julia works hard to improve her self in an attempt to get Paul to think of her as more than just a friend. While stationed in Paris after the war Julia becomes obsessed with French cooking. She takes classes and begins working with a pair of like minded friends on understanding the nuances of French cooking.
The Child's along with their friend Jane Foster experience the hell of McCarthyism as they find themselves interrogated, spied upon and hounded by FBI and State Department investigators.
I also found the brief discussions about Martha Dodd and her husband interesting as she was a central character in the book In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson.
Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath reexamines what it means to have a perceived advantage. From the story of David and Goliath in the bible to combating crime in a Brownsville New York he illustrates the need for people in power to be careful and caring about how they use it.
With respect to David, he was a stone thrower. They were very effective in ancient battle against slow moving, heavily armed infantry. Goliath wanted David to fight him in a test of strength. David wisely chose to attack choosing a tactic that favored his strength. Mr. Gladwell successfully argues that we have been misinterpreting the power relationship of this story for thousands of years. He also applies this to 12 year old girl basketball players. If you don't have the talent to dribble pass or shoot your only option for success is to press the whole game. The scores may be 6 to 0 but you have no chance if you let the other team get passed half court and into their offense.
He outlines the need for those in power not to respond to unrest with brute force but to listen to the demands of the oppressed. Heavy handed tactics applied by the British in Northern Island made the resistance even stronger. The tactics convert fence sitters into people willing to die for a cause. As an aside: The same heavy handed tactics have also not worked in India by the British and in Burma by the Dutch after World War II. From the Aesop's parable: Sun and the Wind - People will change more when offered warmth and kindness than cold, brutal force.
Limitations can be gift. A surprising number of very successful people are dyslexic including the head of Goldman Sax. The struggle to work around the limitation allowed the individuals to become much stronger than average in other areas. He advocates that the absence of struggle while growing up is a significant handicap. It prevents individuals from becoming stronger through adversity. Although dyslexic individuals all credit the struggle to overcome their disability with success none of them would wish the struggle on their children.
Malcolm's philosophy fits nicely with Nassim Talib's concept of Antifragility. A certain amount of good stress does make us stronger.
This book offers an accessible look into the development of the periodic table and the unique characteristics of the elements. The subject varies from practical application of the elements to medical research such as the use of lithium in bipolar disorders to a description of the scientists who discovered the elements.
I found the discussion of pathological science to be very helpful. The odd cold fusion craze came about just after I finished graduate school. Instead of being skeptical of their findings, Pons and Fleischmann jumped to conclusions about their ideas. The author contrasts this to the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen. He did his best to disprove his ideas. He thought he was loosing his mind when he could see the bones in his hand. He repeatedly did careful tests and was able to repeat his results finding a key inside a book. He had his wife confirm this by allowing him to view the bones in her hand. She was horrified and he was relieved that he was not losing his mind.
The book also provides an indirect way of getting to know the personality quirks of a large number of Nobel prize winners. Linus Pauling's dismissal of some information on a cruise ship prevented him from discovering the double helix shape of DNA after he had correctly determined the alpha helix shape of proteins.
The book is a good introduction for aspiring chemists, physicists and lovers of the scientific method.
by Sam Kean covers the history and the scientists behind the creation of the periodic table.